hurricane irene

I must admit I was more than just a bit nervous when I heard a hurricane was headed our way. Having been through a nasty wind storm once before with power outages, contaminated water, downed trees, and the kids blowing away, I was well aware of the damage that could be coming. David alerted me on Thursday morning that I needed to make sure we were ready by buying water and flashlights and batteries. We headed right to the store and stocked up on all three. Target was already nearly out of flashlights, and people were carting water out of Costco like crazy. Chores for Friday including filling the car with gas, heading to the bank for cash, preparing bottles of ice in the freezer, working on the 72 hour kits, and more grocery shopping. My primary goal was finding things the kids would eat that didn't have to be refrigerated in case of a prolonged power outage. By now most stores were out of water completely. I spent Saturday baking things that we could eat if the power went out, filling the bath tubs with water, checking on ward members, cleaning kids and laundry, storing things that could potentially blow away in the garage, moving things off the floor in the basement in case of flooding, filling the fridges with water so they would be full, turning the fridges and freezers to their coldest settings, and gathering supplies (paper products, food, water, juice boxes) upstairs in the kitchen where they would be easily accessible. David affectionately called this the "command post."

Early Saturday evening it started to rain. It rained and rained and rained all night long. In my semi-frantic, paranoid that a tree was going to fall on our house state, I insisted that everyone sleep in the lowest (but not the basement in case of flooding) level of the house away from the biggest trees. The kids stayed up late watching a movie and then slept on an air mattress while David got the couch, and I slept on a relatively cozy concoction of cushions from the upstairs couch and beanbags. Well, not much sleeping actually took place. We were in the midst of a hurricane, and I kept worrying and expecting something awful to happen. But it just rained and rained and rained. While it was windy, we were fortunate to not experience any huge gusts of wind. I woke up about 4:00 am which is when my anxiety level really skyrocketed as they had forecast that the worst part of the storm would be during the early morning hours. It just continued to rain and rain and rain. I was relieved that our power was still on, and when everyone woke up we went about our usual Sunday business minus church. Sarah spent most of the day playing with some new Playmobil toys that I pulled out of the "this might come in handy someday box." Zach spent most of the day loading his trains and tracks in and out of a gift bag that he then carried around the house and kept trying to sneak outside to set up a track and get those trains to work in the sandbox. I caught him every time and reminded him that it was raining and that it wasn't a great idea to play trains in the sandbox in the rain. I spent the day taking more than one nap trying to recover from the nearly sleepless night and the previous few days of frantic preparations. David spent the day checking on ward members. It continued to rain until early afternoon when the hurricane was apparently past us. In the early evening David and Sarah headed out with other men from the ward to pump out some basements of ward members with pumps and generators. Around 5:00 or 6:00 pm, we experienced the highest winds of the hurricane (perhaps the tail end) of about 40 to 50 miles per hour but experienced no damage other than a few small branches and twigs littering the yard. Fortunately, our power never went out. And no trees fell on our house. We were very lucky as others we know in other areas on the East Coast had problems with trees and power outages. There was also extensive flooding throughout New Jersey and hundreds of thousands of people without power all over the East Coast.

I am so grateful for our safety and lack of damage throughout this experience. I am also grateful for the teachings of our Church to prepare ourselves in advance for these types of calamities. Had I not been raised with and taught this important concept I would likely not have known what to do to prepare or would have had to spend a significant amount of money accumulating the items I would have possibly needed in order to weather this storm. There is even the possibility that I would not have been able to obtain the things I needed which would have made an already nerve-racking experience exponentially more anxiety provoking.